I found this article about ecstatic dance and wanted to share. This is something that I used to do a few years back. (Now with covid still happening, it only occurs on a very scaled back level).
My question is this: How does dance fit with Epicureanism, as it is something which creates a certain level of passion and excitement.
Do we know if dancing did occur at Epicurus' Garden? Or would the focus be more on the philosophy, so everyone focused on learning and discussion of philosophy? Or perhaps later Gardens in Roman times had dancing?
How would dancing fit with a modern Garden? (I know there are different types of social dance and this is just one modern type of dance).
Excerpt from article:
We all know what happens when a baby hears music.
If you haven’t witnessed it firsthand, you’ve likely encountered a YouTube video (or, if you’re in the majority, many videos) that captures a child’s reflexive physical reaction to music. Viral videos show babies instinctively scrunching up their faces and nodding their heads to a dubstep track, or flailing their arms and legs from the confines of a car seat when the chorus kicks in on a pop song. (And, if YouTube observations aren’t evidence enough, there’s research like this 2010 study that found babies are predisposed to move to music.)
Turn some tunes on for a kid and the results are not only adorable, they are telling: humans are born to dance.
Yet, even though this innate need to move doesn’t go away as we grow up, few of us adults let loose like our inner child would. When we do dance, it is often in a set way — in a dance class, for instance — or, if in more loose settings like the lusty dance floor of a nightclub, our movement can be filtered through the lenses of social norms and desires. Even as someone who relishes the opportunity to leave it all on the dance floor, my opportunities for truly liberated dance — the kind where you stop thinking and let your body go — are relegated to the dusty desert dance floors of Burning Man, the occasional concert and solo dance parties in my living room. (Of which there are many.)
So what happened to us from tot-hood to adulthood that tampered with our freedom to groove?
